On Leaving and Joining Africanness Through Religion: the 'Black Caribs' Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons

Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 174-211 www.brill.nl/jra On Leaving and Joining Africanness Th rough Religion: Th e ‘Black Caribs’ Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons Paul Christopher Johnson University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, 505 S. State St./4700 Haven, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045, USA [email protected] Abstract Garifuna religion is derived from a confluence of Amerindian, African and European antecedents. For the Garifuna in Central America, the spatial focus of authentic religious practice has for over two centuries been that of their former homeland and site of ethnogenesis, the island of St Vincent. It is from St Vincent that the ancestors return, through spirit possession, to join with their living descendants in ritual events. During the last generation, about a third of the population migrated to the US, especially to New York City. Th is departure created a new diasporic horizon, as the Central American villages left behind now acquired their own aura of ancestral fidelity and religious power. Yet New-York-based Garifuna are now giving attention to the African components of their story of origin, to a degree that has not occurred in homeland villages of Honduras. Th is essay considers the notion of ‘leaving’ and ‘joining’ the African diaspora by examining religious components of Garifuna social formation on St Vincent, the deportation to Central America, and contemporary processes of Africanization being initiated in New York. Keywords Garifuna, Black Carib, religion, diaspora, migration Introduction Not all religions, or families of religions, are of the diasporic kind. Diasporic religions are comprised of practitioners who share references to sacralized spatial horizons, against which the group projects its ritual acts to evaluate their ‘fit’. Diasporic horizon is an apt phrase here because it connotes both a spatial edge of longing or nostalgia and a temporal edge of futurity and desire (Axel 2004: 27, 40). In the first sense of a spatial edge, a diasporic horizon is the ideal model that guides diasporic religious actors in their efforts to derive © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157006607X188911 JJRARA 337,2_f3_174_211.indd7,2_f3_174_211.indd 117474 44/19/07/19/07 22:39:31:39:31 PPMM P. C. Johnson / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 174-211 175 ritual efficacy from spatial authenticity. Certain remembered places are treated as sacred in the sense of being the source of deep and abiding identity, and religious power is acquired through the perceived fidelity of actions done here to the ones done there; there in the direction endowed with ‘mythical feeling value’ (Cassirer 1955: 85). Th e second edge, the temporal one of futurity and desire, suggests how diasporic affiliations map the authentic past always and inevitably in relation to a present situation. Th is is not necessarily in the nar- rowly instrumental sense of the ‘past as used for present purposes’, Halbwachs’s notion usefully critiqued by Rosalind Shaw (2002: 12); but, more modestly, how the memories of a distant site take shape in a material context that exerts ‘retroactive force’ on the past, and in a context of specific ideas of future redemption (Benjamin 1968: 254-255; Lefebvre 1991: 65). And yet this opening gambit for some limited conceptual clarity is inade- quate to describe flesh-and-blood people, who in everyday practice often con- duct themselves in relation to multiple such horizons. Take the example of the Garifuna, formerly known by Europeans as the ‘Black Caribs’, to whose religious practices this essay devotes attention. Garifuna society derived from mixed Amerindian, African and European antecedents, and is now mainly located in some sixty villages along the Caribbean coast of Central America, the majority of which lie in Honduras. For the Garifuna in Central America, the spatial axis of authentic religious practice has for over two centuries been that of their former homeland and place of ethnogenesis, the small island of St Vincent. It is from St Vincent that the ancestors return, through spirit possession, to join with their living descendants in ritual events whose ‘spirit geography’ (Shaw 2002: 46-69) portrays the memory of origins on that island. During the last generation, however, with the local decline of available fruit- industry employment, about a third of the population (100,000 out of 300,000) has migrated abroad, especially to New York City.1 Th is leave-taking created a new diasporic horizon, as the Central American villages left behind now acquired the glow of ancestral fidelity and religious power. Yet the New- York-based Garifuna are also becoming increasingly attentive to the African components of their story of origin, to a degree that has not occurred in homeland villages of Honduras. Th rough the process of migration from Honduras to New York, and of reframing ritual events within the physical environment and the social networks of the city, the Garifuna are joining the religious Afri- can diaspora, as they re-read their ritual events in relation to the practices of neighboring Santeros, Vodunsi, Spiritists and assorted devotees of the Yoruba orishas encountered in the Bronx. Th is cultural transformation entails both agency and its constraint. For, alongside the voluntary ethnogenetic and religious move of joining the African JJRARA 337,2_f3_174_211.indd7,2_f3_174_211.indd 117575 44/19/07/19/07 22:39:32:39:32 PPMM 176 P. C. Johnson / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 174-211 diaspora, lies the involuntary conversion of becoming racially ‘black’, in part by being read into that category in the USA. Th e two conversions—of joining the African diaspora and becoming black—are indices of intertwined new subjectivities and subjectifications (Ong 1999: 18), new opportunities for social affiliation and novel sources of oppression that limit social mobility. Th ose subjectivities and subjectifications collude, however, in raising African historical horizons to prominence since African diasporic and black identifications, though by no means isomorphic, overlap with and often reinforce one another. Migration’s subordinations are not only losses, then; they are injustices that are also the conditions of new self-knowledge (Butler 1997: 2, 14-17). Just so, emigrants’ religious practice is not merely stunted by virtue of being dislocated from its indigenous sites of performance, but also trans- formed and invigorated. Emigrants critically reevaluate, and revalue, the question of authentic origins. By selectively remembering the past and the left-behind territory as an ideological problem, new opportunities for social and political alliances, as well as cultural defense, are opened. Th ose new religious identifications and affiliations fashioned by those Garifuna New Yorkers ‘in diaspora’, moreover, give rise to further productive tensions when they are remitted to the homeland and juxtaposed with local practices, resulting in distinct homeland versus diasporic redactions of ‘the tradition’. Th e Garifunas’ multiple diasporic horizons serve different roles and to some degree are in tension with one another as anchors of varying identifications, creating dynamism that precludes stagnation or closure. Th e Central Ameri- can diasporic horizon links them with Honduran Amerindians on specific occasions and for certain purposes, especially around issues of contested land rights (England 1999, 2006). And the St Vincent horizon aids the Garifuna in prosecuting and processing their historical relation and resistance to British colonialism, as well as current restitution claims against Great Britain for their forced deportation from St Vincent in 1797. Th e African diaspora opens new opportunities for historical reflection and political affiliation both in the USA and globally. Th e Garifuna show how a single group can simultaneously view itself against multiple diasporic horizons; or, put differently, strategically shift between discourses of diasporism and indigenism (Matory 2005: 109). ‘Diasporas’, the Garifuna case suggests, are not naturally or otherwise pre- existing social forms that conserve religious traditions in new spaces, or even transform traditions in the process of their recreation. Th ey are cultural configurations that actual social actors and historical groups move in and out of, activating them to varying degrees. By joining a diaspora and becoming diasporic, a given religious group expresses the rising value and meaning of a possible memory-set and identity-formation. But joining a diaspora is a con- JJRARA 337,2_f3_174_211.indd7,2_f3_174_211.indd 117676 44/19/07/19/07 22:39:32:39:32 PPMM P. C. Johnson / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 174-211 177 structive and not merely expressive act. As a group begins to view itself against new historical and territorial horizons, new religious, ethnic and even racial identifications are disclosed from the past, transforming the meanings of the present (e.g., Benjamin 1968; Gadamer 1975; Lefebvre 1991; Ricoeur 2004). Th is broad trajectory describes a book-length argument on the Garifuna of which this essay is but a part. In this section, my goal is more focused. It is to try to sharpen the now dulled analytical point of calling something ‘diasporic’ by asking when a group is not, or ceases to be, ‘in diaspora’. If I am to argue that the Garifuna are presently joining the African diaspora through religion, why were they not ‘in it’ before; or, how and when did they ‘leave it’? To begin to consider the question, we will first need to restore some analytical bite to the key term, diaspora. Diasproliferation: Who isn’t in diaspora? Th e notion of diaspora has been progressively widened over the last century to include not only Jewish, Greek and Armenian cases, but also diasporas as dis- parate as those of the Portuguese (Klimt and Lubkemann 2002), the Mor- mons (Smith and White 2004) and the New Orleans victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Gross 2005); or even the dispersion of parts of the self from a position of social valuation to one where little is accorded them, as in ‘the sexual diaspora of older women’ (Merkin 2006: 18).2 It suddenly appears, in other words, that everyone is in diaspora.

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